How to Keep America Competitive 652
pkbarbiedoll writes to tell us that in a recent Washington Post article, Bill Gates takes another look at the current state of affairs in computer science and education. According to Gates: "This issue has reached a crisis point. Computer science employment is growing by nearly 100,000 jobs annually. But at the same time studies show that there is a dramatic decline in the number of students graduating with computer science degrees. The United States provides 65,000 temporary H-1B visas each year to make up this shortfall — not nearly enough to fill open technical positions. Permanent residency regulations compound this problem. Temporary employees wait five years or longer for a green card. During that time they can't change jobs, which limits their opportunities to contribute to their employer's success and overall economic growth."
What if there were no immigration quotas? (Score:5, Interesting)
What if there were no immigration quotas?
What if we let anyone and everyone except criminals, terrorists, and those incapable of working come in by just paying port fees, putting down a deposit for a return airplane or bus ticket, and showing they either had a job offer or had a month's worth of living expenses available? Give them all work-authorization cards.
In the first few years there would be a lot of wage-adjustments as certain markets like high-tech, manual-labor, and low-wage retail got flooded but in the long run I think it would be good for the overall economy. Instead of high-tech jobs going to India dragging down American wages, high-tech jobs would remain here at depressed wages but the American economy would benefit from the local employment. It would also give the few Americans who are truly lazy or underperforming a kick in the proverbial kiester if they want to stay employed.
So what if I and my fellow technocrats see wages drop to below $35,000 for starting college grads and proportionately lower for experienced programmers? If it means a more robust American economy and better cultural exchanges with the larger immigrant populations then I'm all for it.
It's 400,000 H1-B's, not 65,000 (Score:1, Interesting)
This was according to a report from the U.S. Government. The reason for the excessive numbers is that no one polices the actual issuance of H1-B's. And this doesn't count the L1-B's, which are even easier to get from what I have noticed.
I'm at work now, and don't have access to my dice account. If anyone cares to dig up the actual thread, that might be useful.
So, in short, Gates and the other CEO's are talking out of their butts.
Re:What if there were no immigration quotas? (Score:3, Interesting)
In that kind of environment, I'd be happy to take a pay cut. The problem is corporations are making a lot of money (record profits for Exxon, a multi BILLION dollar cash chest that Microsoft can't even find ways to spend) and getting artificial laws passed to restrain trade (TV shows months behind in Australia, DVD's for $2.49 in China but $19.99 here that are illegal to re-import, etc.).
With America's relative safety and fair legal system, people with money from all over the world are bidding up our property so we are having more trouble affording to live here. (Galveston- the average house is now 500,000 dollars- their schools are closing because no one with kids can afford to live their and all the real residents of Galveston are being forced to move to the mainland, Any ski area- same problem. Any pretty area- same problem).
The question is how many hours do you have to work to get housing and a hamburger. It's been increasing for the last 9 or 10 years.
IT degree (Score:3, Interesting)
IT majors do 2 programming courses and a no advanced math(no calc). CS majors have a harder dergee program and our college doesn't give a shit about us. They spend time talking about their 100% placement rate with IT major and how all the IT majors are on the management level within 5 years making six figures. Many of the IT majors have their oh so superior "I'll be your boss one day" attitudes which is only reinforced by the attitude of the faculty. It pisses me off to no end because they tout programming skills but if you asked them to do anything more advanced than simple nested for loops and method calls in java they would give you a blank look and go "huh?". Then they make a comment about their golfing skills scoff and walk away. I will plot your downfall you sonofabitch and you won't know what hit you... ahem.. sorry got a little carried away there.
The scary part is with few exception the CS majors look like stereotypical CS majors. Its really scary. Some of us go to the gym or run everyday. The problem is many of us don't and that is the ones people see. The other problem is we have a ton of primadonas. The ones who sit and basically scoff at their classes and claim to be mad hackers. The thing is they are for the most part pretty damned smart. They are to arrogant to do anything or work with other people and they will manage to get their degree and they won't be able to do jack shit in the real world because they refuse to do the mundane programming. They want glamor. These are guys who are about to graduate.
My first semester I got bored and went back and looked at all the mistakes I made registering for classes. One of them was packing my classes into 5 hour work chunks a day or having 2 classes back top back that were way to far away. I spent the next few hours writing some pseudo code. I also asked a friend of mine who is a civil engineering major if he could give me distances between all the building using all the heavily used walking paths on campus. Once I figured it out me and another CS major who was in his third year wrote the actual code up and we took it to the guy who administrates our class scheduling and registration system. He liked it, had another guy on the staff help us adapt it to better work with the database and the front end we employ and we added it. Next semester we saved countless freshman a lot of trouble. We got thanked, credited, were given good experience, I got a recommendation that will help me with any internships I apply for, and hell it was kinda fun to do.
The CS primadonas gave me disdain because I did something so simple that they could do "blindfolded", something that was below their wizardry. IT majors were still pompous arrogant assholes.
It might just be me but since the CS profession lost that bit of glamor it had we have been attracting for the most part the wrong sort of people. We need to make it so its worth the time to get a CS major again instead of making a CS major a miserable experience. That however is just my 0.02$ based on my narrow little slice of hell. Thank god I'm going to a different college next year and starting my game design degree then my masters in CS.
Large costs, no security, short career, H1B (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Absolutely KILL yourself in college with 35 hours a week of homework for ONE Database class while your friends are spending about 12 hours a week for all homework in all classes.
2) Pay $50,000 over 4 years just like they do.
3) Graduate into a low-status job when it comes to dating (I get a LOT more action from my $500 massage therapy training than I ever did from my CS degree-- MT is a female dominated field- you can't turn around without finding three or four who want to hang out and do tradeoffs and go to conferances- and MT work is like working out 8 hours a day so they tend to be fit and they tend to also be very nice people because they deal with the public a lot-- the pay is crap of course).
4) Start with a reasonably high salary-- but after a few years, it becomes clear you need to leave the field and project lead or manage (that's me these days) if you ever want to make "real" money.
5) Be managed by people who absolutely HATE that they have to have you- they view you as a COST.
6) Never ever be understood by management (either overworked when you are stupid or underworked once you smarten up). They'll replace you in a heartbeat with crappy but cheaper labor. I.e. NO JOB SECURITY. How can you buy a bloody house when you might be unemployeed for 7 months without notice.
7) And then-- at 55-- no more work. I've known so many who were just pushed out of the field. And you need the insurance you see. (Hence also my shift into manager+tech skills).
Corporations spent the 90's and the early 00's repeatedly teaching us that they have no loyalty to us and that they are going to hire people making $10,000 to replace us.
Okay-- WE GET IT. We are leaving the field. Young pups are not entering the field in the first place. And now they complain? Screw them. I hope they have severe problems and end up having to pay $150 an hour for 5 or 6 years to get people to enter the field again.
H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's my solution:
1) Poll all current welfare and permanent disability recipients. See how many are interested and capable of learning to perform IT work.
2) Instead of continuing to pump money into a system that only perpetuates poverty, educate the people who are both interested and capable. Get them a CNA or MCSE and help them get their first job. After the first paycheck, government assistance ends since at that point you should be a) getting paid and b) have health coverage.
3) Increase funding for science and math teachers from elementary school to high school. We can use the money that we're saving from the public assistance programs to fund this.
4) Increase funding for music and art. While most people don't realize this, there is a strong connection between math and music as well as science and art in the human brain. Researchers are still trying to work out exactly what it is, but studies show that there is definitely a link for most people.
5) Raise instead of lower the requirements in order to graduate high school. One of my friends has a daughter who just started high school this year. The only math requirements for her to graduate are two semesters of math. What this means is that they're only required to take and pass Pre-Algebra I & II. Since most everyone on here are IT pros of some kind, I'm sure you're aware that this doesn't cut it for college. Algebra I & II, Geometry, and Trig should be the minimum requirements, IMHO.
6) As a corollary to #5, we need to raise the requirements for science as well. Her school district only requires two semesters of science. What this really means is that you take a semester of earth science and you take health class. IMHO, you should take Biology I & II, Chemestry I & II, Anatomy & Physiology, and Physics.
7) They do require 8 semesters of English, however, I can tell you that what passes for papers in many of these classes is laughable. I have a friend who teaches freshman & sophomore composition at a local university. The level of literacy among these kids is...horrific. I've helped her grade papers and seen things like an entire 3 page paper that was a single run on sentence. These kids do not know the difference between things like "to", "too", and "two". I cannot count the number of times I've seen someone write something like "I'm going two the store." "There", "their", and "they're" is another one that they don't seem to be aware of. Then there are the kids that write papers like they send IM and text messages, "UR 4 real?"
8) Ditch "no child left behind" philosophy. This blatantly ignores the fact that some of the kids *need* to be left behind. If they cannot keep pace in a regular classroom, they need to be sent to remedial classes until they are on a par with their peers. Keeping them in the regular classrooms has a negative effect on the kids who do their work and keep up. All this has done is resulted in a dumbing down of the entire curriculum. Here in Dallas, the school district recently published an article proclaiming their pride in the fact that only 25% of the graduates last year were functionally illiterate. They're proud of this figure because it's down from 33% last year. That means 1 in 4 high school graduates cannot read and write well enough to fill out a job application at Wal-mart. They cannot add and subtract well enough to make change for a dollar. That is absolutely shameful and how anyone in their right mind can take pride in that is beyond me.
2 cents,
QueenB.
Another year another H1B visa push (Score:1, Interesting)
Feb 2004:
Reforms demanded as H-1B visa limit reached
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5161069.html [zdnet.com]
April 2005
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5687039.html [zdnet.com]
Gates wants limits scrapped on H1bs
March 2006
Bill Gates says H1B needs more freedom.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
2007, Gates talks out of his ass.
They want more H1Bs, it helps reduce the short term cost of programmers, lets them keep a cap on their salary bill and increase their profits. It fucks up the normal supply-demand market that drives people to go to University, but what does he care, he can always fill the shortfall with more imported programmers.
Re:How about the 17-year education lag? (Score:5, Interesting)
everything to do with ID'ing yourself as in the x-th percentile of intelligence
Unfortunately this is not true. I'm in the 99.9th percentile as far as intelligence (at least according to the Triple Nine Society) but I only have a Bachelor's degree and a not-very-good GPA, which is enough to keep me from going to a good graduate school. Why is my GPA so low? Because schools don't measure intelligence.
When I was in elementary school I began to realize that there is a "sweet spot" for intelligence in school. Since then I've seen more and more evidence of it. As a student's intelligence approaches the sweet spot from below, the student gets higher and higher grades. But if intelligence continues to increase past that, grades begin to go back down. (Of course there are other factors besides intelligence that can cause low grades, but the main idea is valid.) This is why "gifted" programs work -- "gifted" students actually get better grades in harder courses because the standard courses bore them to death. But even "gifted" programs have a "sweet spot" beyond which your intelligence starts to work against you. (I put "gifted" in quotes because it presupposes someone doing the gifting.)
After ten years I am considering leaving the computer field. In the jobs I've held so far, I've brought knowledge from my education and from books only to be disallowed from using it because the boss doesn't know how to use it, has no way of verifying that I'm using it correctly, and is terrified of having to find another employee who knows it too. And yet, I don't know any other way to get the job done, so I end up using the knowledge I have anyway. This makes me "disobedient." When the books and the evidence show that I am right, this makes my situation even worse. No boss likes to be proved wrong.
My mother is a math teacher. Her students always complain to her, "Why do we have to learn this stuff? We'll never have to use it!" Sadly, I find myself siding with the students: if you go to the trouble to learn, say, differential equations, you won't be able to use them because you won't be able to find a boss who understands them enough to allow you to use them.
Intelligence is an asset when you use it against the natural world. But it seems to be an enormous liability in society. So don't go thinking that employers want intelligence. They don't. They want obedience. And that is what schools really measure: people whose intelligence is below the "sweet spot" can't understand orders well enough to obey them, but people whose intelligence is above that point understand their orders too well and tend to question them, and that isn't wanted either.
That is why employers are in a quandary with engineering. Engineering demands intelligence and intelligence doesn't work well with obedience. Some of this is due to American culture, too, where, in spite of the school system, people are raised with the ideas of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," which is why many employers prefer to outsource to cultures where obedience to authority is a more important and accepted part of life.
Re:That depends upon you and the job. (Score:2, Interesting)
I dunno how people get SO into their jobs. I work to earn money to allow me to do and buy things I like. I have the opposite problem. I have to work hard to concentrate at work ON work....there are so many other things in life that interest me...
But, gotta pay for those interests somehow...so, I force myself to think about work. But, man, it sure leaves my head when that door hits me on the ass on the way out!!
That being said...what we are seeing now, with the shortage of college comp. sci grads...is mostly just a delayed reaction seem from a few years ago, when all the downsizing hit, and so many tech jobs were being moved offshore...and IT salaries were being cut for the jobs that did remain.
This scared the shit outta kids in college and before I would guess. I mean, why would you consider a career in a field that took a good bit of study and effort if there was not a good paying job in the end?
I mean, if you like to hack around on computers, you can easily do that on your own time....while earning a healthy living doing something else.
If IT jobs keep getting more plentiful, and salaries start getting decent again...kids will start studying it for a career again.
Re:Au contraire (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Au contraire (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Au contraire (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in the hardware side of the world, and your company's main product gives me fits. I have no malice towards you, but I really wish all the zealots in the Linux/OSS cam would get their heads out of their individual distro's asses and produce a real competitor to your OS/Office suite. I think they are close with Ubuntu, now all we nead is a 100% compatible exchange server mimic and client, along with a powerpoint clone that's not power-bloat and we're all set.
-nB
Re:Au contraire (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard to day. When i was working in devdiv, most days i got in between 9 and 10, and left around 7. When it was crunch time to get VS.NET (7.0) out the door, for a while there it was team-dinnners every nite, and people would be at work until 8 or 9. Of course, nobody got to work before 9. In redmond, at 7:59am, the main doors to buildings are still locked.
Now that I am on a different campus (in Fargo), the local culture is much different. At 8:30 the parking lot is full and at 6 its empty. Leaving the Redmond main campus at 6pm was suicide because the traffic was so outrageous. You could leave at 5 or at 6:45 and get home at the same time.
Yeah, one or both is likely. MS isn't the darling of the tech world it once was; you're no longer a millionaire after 7 years. The compensation structure has chnaged a few times since 2000 when people were leaving MS in droves to do startups. Many people think we made some poor hiring decisions around that time frame (after all, _I_ was hired, and my main motivation for interviewing was to get a free trip to Seattle and to mouth-off about how awesome linux was to a bunch of MSFT people
MSFT doesn't aim to be the pay-leader, so people purely motivated by that will probably look elsewhere.
That said, I think many tech companies have open positions and describe having difficulty filling them. Does the entire sector, as a whole, not pay enough? Are there people out there that are not working for anyone, rather than work for what they deem to be too little? Said another way, if you see that across the board, tech companies have open heads, it's hard to suggest that it is purely a Microsoft problem related to salary or other undesirability. Doesn't Google have difficulty hiring people? Apple?
Re:Overworked? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hire women, blacks, people from state Universities (Score:4, Interesting)
(The university business is particularly blecherous since the actual pioneers of the information age were almost entirely NOT ivy-leaguers, and had more than a sprinkling of non wasp-males among their number.)
If you include women, blacks, American Indians, Hispanic-descent citizens, various "halfbreeds", and graduates of other fine universities (especially state universities) - rather than reserving them to support (or janitorial) positions, there is no shortage whatsoever.
But there's another part of this: You have to PAY them on the basis of performance, respect their opinions, and avoid filing the serial numbers off their ideas and crediting them to the stars from that tiny pool of ivy-league whites and orientals. If you hire them and then systematically abuse them and pay them 2/3 of what you pay the in crowd, they'll burn out and drop out.
(I watched this happen to an exceptional talent. Woman. Part Amerind. State universities. IQ so high a psych professor had to roll a special test to estimate it. Four degrees, one advanced and from a top U, in diverse subjects (computer science among them). Sharp as a tack and total grasp of the subtleties of software engineering. Yet administrators systematically ignored or rejected her ideas or credited her colleagues for them when they were finally accepted. Last straw was in a windows application development shop when she found out the clueless-about-Windows-programs unix people she was teaching were paid more than half again what she got. She left the field.)
Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
There is no courses called "pre-algebra II" or "trig." High school math for college-bound kids in the US usually goes like this:
grade 9: Geometry+Trigonometry
grade 10: Algebra II
grade 11: Pre-calc
grade 12: Calc
College-bound kids typically had Algebra I in middle school.
Mediocre students (some of whom go to real college, some to community college, some to career training) are usually a year behind, so their high school math is:
grade 9: Algebra I
grade 10: Geometry+Trig
grade 11: Algebra II
grade 12: Pre-calc
The rest, I believe, take some sort of "remedial math for monkeys" courses over and over until they pass with the minimum requirements to graduate.
So, your idea of what is in the HS curriculum is wrong. Don't worry. Most students get geometry and trig on the first or second year of HS.
Of course, if you ask me, this is all a crap curriculum from a earlier age. Today, kids should be learning set theory, probability, discrete math, statistics, logic, and personal finance. Forget calc and advanced algebra! The (very small) number of people who can use that will get it in college. Stats and logic are useful to EVERYONE, and should be taught to everyone!
Re:Overworked? (Score:1, Interesting)
You must be in a part of the country where the job market is better. Around here, there are far more potential employees than positions, and so none of the companies I've ever worked for has had sane comp time policies except for the two that allowed telecommuting. Of course, one of those was bought and dismantled, and the other collapsed from politics and stupid management.
A couple jobs back I worked for a place that had great policies on paper. But the comp time request had to be approved by management, and had to be taken within 2 weeks of when it was earned, so you couldn't bank it. And you couldn't take more than a day off without two weeks notice. When management planned poorly and required six to eight weeks of overtime weeks, nobody got any comp time.
And in my current job, "core hours" are between 9 am and 4 pm. You need written permission from God to not be in the office during those hours. Even if you stayed in the office until 3am the night before getting something un-f@cked.
You can burn yourself out at any job. Burnout is 90% about you and only 10% about your employer, in my experience.
It's not that simple. Burnout is about not seeing goals, and not seeing a way to meet the goals, and about not making progress towards those goals. Employers with waffling management and no clearly communicated short- and long-term plans contribute substantially to burnout. I'm dealing with it right now, because I work for a startup that can't figure out what its business plan is, and so keeps on trying new ones on a monthly basis. The goal I was working for a month ago has nothing in common with the goal I'm working for now. As a result, I feel like I'm expending a great deal of effort for no good reason, because every business plan change has an IMMEDIATE! URGENT! RIGHT NOW! deadline, and 80% of the work I do to support it in code gets thrown away when the business plan changes again.
And of course I have a long-term plan, but see above about how there are more potential employees than positions in this area; and I'm not about to move to a place that's more butt-headedly corporate than this one.
Re:How about the 17-year education lag? (Score:3, Interesting)
Every person I have a relationship with, I get one no for every nine yes's.
A co-worker offers to do the project but they want to use a methodology I don't think is best... I let them do it they way they want to- they are doing the work.
A girlfriend offers to help me with something but is going to do it in a way I don't think is best... same thing.
I only say "no" if it is critical.
But how do you decide if it is critical? Humans left to our own judgement would promote everything to critical.
By making a hard budget that I have to say "yes" most the time, it forces me to save my "no"s with two effects.
1) People like me since I'm not arguing with them and saying their opinion, approach, etc. was as good as mine.
2) When I DO say no, they tend to pay attention since I do it so rarely. Since I respected their opinion so many times, they tend to respect mine.
You are not respected for being right until after you are dead. If you are brilliant and driven- go for it. But if you want a happy life with real respect and appreciation today, then you need to let other people be right (even if you know they are not) on a lot of non-critical stuff.
Re:Au contraire (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm just going to speak to a part of this. If you look around you, programming is a field where one invests a lot of up-front time and effort before getting much in the way of rewards. The low-haning fruit has been harvested, AND IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE DONE AGAIN! So. If you have such an industry, and you go through boom-and-bust cycles (as we do), then people are going to be VERY skittish about making the kind of commitment that you want them to give. YOU (the company) aren't making they commitment, so asking it of them can only be seen as a power-play.
When I first started working, I was a firm believer in honesty, etc. As time went on, I observed that politics was more important than ability to do the official job. I ended up quite cynical about companies. Managers that have been delegated power to do their job instead use it for personal advancement at the expense of the staff, and appear to feel that it's their right. There are exceptions, but the exceptions aren't as personally successful (as measured in terms of the number of promotions).
This, I feel, is that nature of human politics. It's wrong to centralize power to accomplish some good end, because once centralized the power will be abused, and the good end will not be accomplished in any final way, because that would eliminate the need for the centralization of the power, which isn't to the benefit of those controlling the power.
OTOH, human society requires reliable structures in order to operate properly. 'Tis a difficult puzzle. I don't know of a decent answer. History provides MANY examples of indecent answers, but none of good ones. If you did have a decent answer, the problem would then arise of "how does one get from here to there?" This is made difficult if one imposes the condition "And don't make things a lot worse in the process!"
Re:H1-B and Student Visas != Permanent Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
If the curriculum isnt toughened up the Indian kids will take the jobs - either here or in India through outsourcing. No amount of racist immigration policies can stop that.